This allows them to monopolise that knowledge, and maximise the price of the resulting medicines. And a US Government Accountability Office report the previous year noted that the industry model is increasingly to simply buy up smaller firms that have already developed products. As one former US government official complained, the fact we call it the “Pfizer” vaccine is “the biggest marketing coup in the history of American pharmaceuticals”.Ī Stat news analysis in 2018 concluded that Pfizer developed only a fraction – about 23% – of its drugs in-house. That was the work of public money, university research and a much smaller company, Germany’s BioNTech. The truth is, they aren’t the sole inventors of the vaccine. Companies like Pfizer behave more like hedge funds, buying up and controlling other firms and intellectual property, rather than traditional medical research companies. There are many who will argue that while large pharma companies do behave ruthlessly, we must accept it because the service they provide – inventing lifesaving medicines – is so crucial. News last week suggests that they’re getting there, confounding the pharmaceutical industry’s claims that you couldn’t possibly make such a vaccine in poorer countries. Because neither Pfizer nor Moderna will share their knowhow, the scientists have had to start from scratch. Pfizer took a similar line on the new facility that has been set up in South Africa to try to get to grips with mRNA vaccines so that it can share this revolutionary medical technology with the world. ![]() It has been claimed that 100 factories and laboratories around the world could have been making vaccines, but have been unable to do so because they cannot access patents and recipes like those held by Pfizer. This sort of suspension of normal business rules during times of great need was previously common, such as with penicillin during the second world war, or sharing smallpox vaccine knowledge in the 1960s.īut in this case, Pfizer’s chief went on the offensive, deriding CTAP as “nonsense” – and saying it was “dangerous” to share companies’ intellectual property. Companies would still have been paid, but they wouldn’t be able to restrict production. They urged companies to share vaccine recipes, creating a sort of “patent pool” known as CTAP, which would have allowed openness and collaboration. These effectively allow big pharma corporations to operate as monopolies, with no responsibility to share the knowledge they own, however much society needs it.Įarly on, the World Health Organization (WHO) recognised that we would need to scale up production very rapidly – and that individual corporations like Pfizer simply wouldn’t have the necessary capacity. That’s because, at the root of the Pfizer model, are a set of intellectual property rules, laid down in trade deals. Pfizer wasn’t selling many doses to poorer countries, but neither would it allow them to produce the life-saving vaccine on their own, through licensing or patent sharing. By last October, Pfizer had sold a measly 1.3% of its supply to Covax, the international body set up to try to ensure fairer access to vaccines. If you look at its global distribution, Pfizer sells a tiny proportion of its vaccines to low-income countries. Pfizer has sold the vast majority of its doses to the richest countries in the world – a strategy sure to keep its profits high. Tom Frieden, a former director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accused the firm of “war profiteering”. ![]() It has been claimed that the company initially tried to pitch their medicine to the US government for an eye-popping $100 a dose. That means the NHS has paid a mark-up of at least £2bn – six times the cost of the pay rise the government agreed to give nurses last year. Either way, the company is selling doses at a huge profit – the UK government paid £18 a shot for its first order, £22 for its most recent purchase. Others have suggested it could be much cheaper. The company claims that its vaccine costs just under £5 per dose to produce. Right from the start, Pfizer was clear that it wanted to make a lot of money from Covid. Ultimately, their approach affects who does, and does not, receive vaccines. Pharmaceutical corporations like Pfizer have led this rollout, setting the terms by which they sell vaccines and deciding who to prioritise. The global vaccine rollout has created levels of inequality so great that many call it a ‘vaccine apartheid’.
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